Connie Speros and Bruce Literal didn’t set out to build Oregon’s first full-fledged home framed with mass timber—or even a house for themselves.

The couple, both retired Portland high school art teachers and visual artists, had owned their own home since 1976, on a beautiful 12-acre wooded property an hour’s drive north of the city, near the small town of Scappoose. Raised in rural parts of Oregon at a time when the timber industry was dominant, Connie and Bruce had happily spent years commuting from their forested property, just to stay immersed in the towering Douglas fir trees.

After the couple’s retirement, their daughter, Stephanie, decided to move home from San Diego, and a family friend living and working for Bruce and Connie on their property needed something more permanent than a trailer to live in—so the family decided to build a second dwelling. Bruce and Connie sought a design that reflected their artistic sensibility as well as a seismically resilient structure in this earthquake-prone region—and preferably one designed and built with a little help from their friends.

The couple reached out to a longtime connection, British architect Alan Morris, whose wife had lived with Connie for months as an exchange student.

$10,870 Site Preparation	$48,460 Substructure	$218,670 Superstructure
$53,320 Roof, Siding, & Insulation	$18,530 Suspended Balconies	$56,270 Interiors (Nonstructural)
$29,190 Fittings, Furniture & Equipment	$64,970 Mechanical & Electrical	$26,150 Access Bridge
$16,780 Landscaping	$12,240 Direct Plant Hire	$36,100 External Works & Drainage
Grand Total: $591,550

Morris suggested building the new dwelling with cross-laminated timber (CLT), an engineered wood product made of sandwiched strips of wood. The material’s structural strength could enable wide-open volumes while also reducing a building’s carbon impact (compared to building with concrete and steel).

While mass timber, and particularly CLT, have been utilized in Europe for decades, only in recent years, with code approval, have the materials become more prevalent in the United States. Oregon has become an epicenter of America’s fledgling CLT industry, hosting the annual International Mass Timber Conference and producing some of the nation’s first mass-timber high-rises.

“Living in the woods in Oregon surrounded by tall cedars and Douglas firs, both of them wanted to express the virtues of solid wood in their new house,” says the London-based Morris, who made numerous site visits during the project’s design and construction. Connie and Bruce also saw the new house as a long-term investment.

“Bruce and I had started by talking about building a modest little house,” Connie recalls. “When Alan talked about CLT and the impact that it could have enlivening the timber industry here, we thought, ‘What a great idea.’ And it has so many possibilities for aging in place. There’s room for two separate living spaces on the main level, so I thought, ‘this is a great investment for our future.’ And so the cost is reasonable in that respect.”

Not only would the CLT home be energy efficient, thanks to the thermal mass of the engineered material—it could also be built much more quickly than a traditional house. “They’re not spring chickens, Connie and Bruce—the speed of construction meant they wouldn’t get in a mess by building a little bit at a time,” Morris says. “They got really excited, like little kids. They said to me, ‘You mean it’s going to be constructed in a week?”

Building with this material also meant an investment in longevity. In the next 50 years, the Pacific Northwest is predicted to experience a massive earthquake—perhaps the largest in American history. In such an event, this house could prove to be more resilient than most. “CLT is pretty much designed to sway,” Morris says. “You can shake it. It’s a different kind of value.”

Morris recalls taking a group of architects, engineers, and builders on a tour of the residence shortly after it was completed, during the International Mass Timber Conference. Its seismic strength was a particular point of interest.

“People were amazed at the foundation, and how much steel was in a residential house,” Morris recalls. “The engineers said that all of Portland will probably fall down before this house will.”

When the project was first conceived in 2016, Morris was “completely gobsmacked,” as he recalls, to learn there were not yet cross-laminated-timber suppliers in the United States—even in Oregon, which leads the nation in timber production. (Since then, that playing field has changed.) Connie and Bruce contracted with Austrian company KLH and engineer Sebastian Popp to provide the CLT and, crucially, the structural engineering necessary to make the building “more efficient, and above all more economic,” he adds.

Sure enough, once the timber arrived on-site, the home’s basic form was assembled within days.

“I remember sitting beneath the roof in what was the most amazing ‘dollhouse,’ with no windows yet, no nothing—just view of the trees east and west,” the architect remembers. “By that weekend, Connie was taking her friends up the ladders in the rain and saying, ‘Look at this!’ Their joy level was high.”

The completed project, built on a hillside terrace just below Bruce and Connie’s original home, is a large two-and-a-half-story box. Its second floor cantilevers slightly over the first to create a wide-open, column-free volume overlooked by a mezzanine level just beneath the vaulted ceiling.

“I remember saying at one point, ‘How can we make the box stiff enough to have almost no walls inside at all?’” recalls Morris. “Sebastian said, ‘We’ll just put fins in every module.’” Working with the engineer, the architect designed the structure using exceptionally long and thick pieces of timber. “In the computer model, the whole place stood up without anything else,” Morris says.

The wooded property was already divided into a series of terraces, where the couple (and family friend Rick) had built extensive gardens, and it was strewn with large basalt boulders that they used to create a rocky setting for the new home.

“Rick could operate heavy equipment, so he arranged and rearranged hundreds of boulders. He saw it as his legacy: this kind of land art,” Bruce says of their friend and tenant. “He would say that the trees are hugging the boulders—they don’t want to let go, and they’re using those boulders to stay in place.”

As a result, the house is not just nestled into the forested hillside, but part of a whole composition. “It just feels like the house is floating in that space,” Connie says in reference to the cantilevered second floor. Drawing from their experience as artists, the couple selected black steel cladding to allow the home to disappear into the landscape.

“Instead of having a blue house or a red house that would compete with the trees,” Bruce says, “It’s more like a shadow. Your focus isn’t just on the house, it’s on all the trees and mountains and stuff around it.”

The home’s name, Boulder Bridge, refers partly to its main entrance on the second floor, which can be reached via a suspended walkway. “I always wanted to build something that had a bridge,” Bruce says. “I suppose it’s a fairy-tale thing.”

The double-height entry is flooded with sunshine thanks to a skylight above, and two triangular bump-outs jut out from the facade to provide a covered entry on one side and, on the other, a glass-ensconced breakfast nook beside the kitchen.

The interior is divided into two apartment-like dwellings: one for Stephanie, and one for Rick, each with its own upstairs level. The two lived there for a year, before Rick passed away from cancer. (It was Rick’s idea to paint the ceiling bordering his bedroom skylight black instead of white; instead of bouncing sunlight, he wanted to look up at the stars.)

“I really like the balconies, big windows, and lots of views looking at nature,” Stephanie wrote by email. “The house makes me feel very comfortable, safe, and warm.”

The interior is completely free of drywall. Most wood walls are load-bearing, and those that aren’t, usually painted various colors, are wrapped in plywood. To save money, Connie and Bruce performed much of the interior finish work themselves, and Rick and Bruce took on the preparatory site work. Connie finished the principal bathroom by laying floral tiles in a kind of half-abstract, half-representational layout that wraps around a wall. They also created a tile-clad entry arch in slate, meant to evoke the amphitheater of boulders outside.

“I'm proud of it—we got all kinds of flak from friends, about how about people our age don’t build houses and blah blah blah. But we did.” —Connie Speros, Homeowner

The home is furnished with meaningful art and craft pieces from Bruce and Connie’s lives, including (at the entry) a Turkish rug they bought many years ago while traveling in Europe. Shortly after the new house was completed, the rug-maker made a house call to the property, and the couple purchased numerous other rugs now found throughout the house. Near the entry is a striking painting of earth, square-shaped and tilted 45 degrees into a diamond, by Scott McIntire. A corner armoire in the kitchen is a family heirloom, originally built by Bruce’s uncle for his mother, with fused glass panels by an artist friend of Connie’s, Cindy Irby.

There is an overriding sense that the house and its furnishings are a complete work—as if Bruce and Connie commissioned the creative people in their orbit to make something worthy of this gorgeous, forested piece of land.

“It was breathtaking,” Connie says, "the first time I stood on the balcony and looked out into the tops of those trees.”

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Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Alan Morris Architect

Builder: Deform NW

Structural Engineer: New Paradigm Engineering

Cross-laminated Timber Provider/Engineer: KLH USA

Cross-laminated Timber Installation: New Energy Works